Season 1, Episode 4

Did you catch the cameo by John le Carré this week? Yes, that was he — the peevish older gentleman at the next table at lunch (listed by his real name, David Cornwell, in the credits), the diner to whom Jonathan apologized after Corky’s lobster salad meltdown.

Memorable line of the night: “My naughty little greaseball.”

I’m normally a big fan of Corky’s. But his dissolving into babble was probably the lowest point for me of a generally highly enervating episode.

Full confession: I did not like tonight’s show. It made me cross. In fact, it irritated me so much that I am now using words, like “cross,” that are mannered and fake — just like the grimaces, the searching looks and the stock images of bureaucrats blowing gaskets that assaulted our eyes and ears this week. The drum beats creating tension where we felt none; Dickie Roper’s tightly clenched cigar. The burning sunset. The cool white house filled with hotSpanish blood.

Enough griping.

Let’s just do a straight-up recap of the action:

Jonathan Pine is now fully launched as Andrew Birch, a “merchant adventurer” with a high-limit credit card and a new set of bespoke suits who should, I would have thought, have been growing tougher and tougher as he sank into the cruel world of the weapons trade but is for some reason instead, turning into more and more of a softy — dressing up for his patron like “Pretty Woman” with a 32-inch waist, grinning at his new weapons like Harry Potter setting eyes on his first broomstick.

She’s so much more appealing when she’s being honest and fully human. Why doesn’t she bring her son to Spain? Jonathan asks.

“Because that’s not what [Roper] bought on the Upper East Side. I’m young and beautiful, remember?” Ouch.

Notice how Jed, in this episode, keeps referring to “us”? Does she mean her and Roper? Her, Roper and Corky, perhaps? I am of two minds about the whole sex-with-Jonathan incident. It was, on the one hand, inevitable. But at the same time, it made me anxious. So much torture has been foreshadowed, what with the talk of hanging by “lovely ankles” and chopping off of hands and damage to Jed’s “beautiful sweet face.”

Could this all be a setup? Jed playing Jonathan, with Roper’s approval, and Jonathan, fully cognizant, playing along? His “I haven’t seen much of her, to be honest” to Roper right after Jed’s nighttime visit was like an admission of guilt. Corky’s talk of “the lovers,” the “perfect pair,” and the “blind man,” Roper’s increasing pique — it was all a bit too much. I’d like to think the stiltedness of the entire episode was somehow meant to echo the artificiality of multiple layers of players being played.

But somehow I doubt it.

Our friend Angela Burr is always a welcome presence on screen: crisp, funny, and understated, keeping us off balance with sentences that seem to lack standard punctuation. She’s closing in now. She knows what Dickie’s selling, who’s buying it and who, in the British and United States governments, is getting paid off. But she’s also frustrated and angry. And worried. Or pretending to be frustrated, angry and worried because Jonathan has gone off the reservation. We know this because she slammed her hand down on a table. Bad show, old girl.

We also know now why Angela hates Roper so — he got into the chemical arms game after seeing the horrors wreaked by an attack on Iraqi schoolchildren with mustard and sarin gas. (Friends of “Homeland,” let’s thank the television gods once again for the antidote that saved Peter Quinn from their fate.) Lung tissue “around their mouths and on their faces”! What can it feel like to bring a child into such a world?

I think there’s more to Angela’s pregnancy than meets the eye. Which brings me to my closing question: Do you think there really is a “Mr. Burr”?

Judith Warner is the author, most recently, of “We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.”

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